Category Archives: Society

Britain, European Union, Government, Politics, Society

Brexit: The last chance to restore trust

BREXIT BRITAIN

HAROLD WILSON once said a week was a long time in politics. In the present political climate, weeks must feel like eternities. Brexit has changed people’s views as the debate has raged on. For some, who were once moderate party members, have turned into hardened rebels; others who initially supported the Government’s approach now have real concerns about its direction.

Yet, the key conversation we should be having – one that has really been absent for too long – is what the next 15 or 20 years will look like; what we should actually do now, beyond the platitudinous slush, to ensure that the children of today and tomorrow can have a better life than us.

Deep down, our politicians must know that there is something amiss in the body politic of today. Populations are restless. People feel left out and ignored. The traditional levers to improve the world are malfunctioning – there is slower growth, foreign policy chaos and domestic budget stricture. The status quo appears brittle and worn. Where is the clarity about what to replace it with? The world is turning, and, for many, it appears to be turning away from them.

Underneath that sense of foreboding are two existential issues. The first is technology. In the lifetime of those born in the 1960s have seen the advent of the home computer, the internet and the mobile phone. Millions of jobs have been created by a medium that was invisible a generation ago and which, most likely, will have changed beyond recognition by the next.

Yet, even in normal times, politicians’ answer to technology is to either ignore it or grandstand on it. Take the tech giants and their questionable data practices. The elite have gone to town on them in recent months. CEOs have been chastened. Companies run warm adverts saying things like ‘we’ve changed’ without proper public consideration of what, over the long-term, we all need to change to.

The country’s focus on Brexit has meant we’ve missed the underlying, hard questions. Are they platforms or publishers? Are they monopolists or innovators? How do individual nation states regulate cross-border activity? The amount of time that politicians spend in legislatures debating the philosophical, economic and social impacts of artificial intelligence, big data and the loss of privacy is inversely proportional to their coming impacts.

There are many in parliament who are evangelical about technology and its ability to change lives. But surely, we have to ready citizens to take advantage of those opportunities through skills, flexibility and attitude. It is inevitable that there are huge potential changes coming, ones which will reshape our economy and our labour market. If these issues are not properly talked about, by preparing people to deal with them, we will be storing up tremendous problems for the future. We have to do much better.

This can all be reasonably predicted because it has happened before. The European Economic Community that Britain joined in 1973 was a very different beast to the EU we have part of since its expansion. Few people expected then that an economic union would also become a political one. Nor were most people aware or able to predict how fundamentally globalisation would reshape our economy and our communities. A lack of public consultation that forced through such massive changes had achieved a bipartisan consensus in Westminster. And it is this which brings us to the second existential issue for British politics: trust.

Those citizens who have borne the brunt of these radical changes feel ignored and patronised. Their security has been undermined and their way of life transformed. The years since the financial crash have been especially hard for many – to say nothing of the toxic cacophony of expenses scandals, dodgy dossiers, spin and the obscuring of hard choices. It seems to many that the system is now not only untrustworthy but also fundamentally rotten.

Against that backdrop, Brexit was an opportunity to restore that trust with a large section of society. By granting the referendum, our political class seemed to have recognised the need for a new democratic input – for some kind of check from the people of Britain on the consensus MPs had established. “The Government will implement what you decide,” said the booklet that dropped through every household letterbox, and many millions of voters believed it. Their decision was close but clear: Britain must leave the EU. The definition of that result was politically distilled, and the departure from the single market and the customs union has been cemented. In the general election of 2017, 85 per cent of people agreed.

Distrust and disengagement have now been replaced by curiosity. People hesitantly dared to hope that the political class was actually going to do something they requested.

Then along came Chequers. At a stroke, that emerging engagement with politics was dashed. Government spin proclaims that we are taking back control. The reality is that we are ceding it, at least on trade, in perpetuity. The document is a clever, legalistic, splitting-the-difference tome; the product of a process driven by a civil service never fully reconciled to leaving and, ultimately, not wanting to grasp the nettle.

Whatever we may think about the referendum, and whatever our own personal views on Chequers are, the key measure is one of trust. Does this proposal properly embody the decision of the British people in 2016? How is it sold to the disengaged or the exasperated? And, when this offer is salami-sliced away into irrelevance by the EU, what should the British people be told? That we gave it our best effort but came up short? That Brussels was right? That our political masters know best?

If Brexit directly leads to the jobs of truck drivers and call-centre workers being automated away without consultation or compensation, politicians here will not be forgiven. And if, after years of globalisation and European integration, MPs do not honour the pledge on which they hung their entire credibility, and implement the orders they had been given, politicians will lose the trust of the electorate for a generation.

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Britain, Economic, Government, History, Society, Technology

AI is not a threat but an opportunity

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

IS the march of technology and machines something to be fearful of? Andy Haldane, the Bank of England chief economist, thinks we should be wary at the very least. He recently told the BBC that the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) will make many jobs obsolete with far-reaching social and cultural consequences. He predicted a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” on a scale greater than anything seen before. “Each of those [previous industrial revolutions] had a wrenching and lengthy impact on the jobs market, on the lives and livelihoods of large swathes of society,” Mr Haldane said.

There is a distinction to be drawn between the short and long-term impacts of such upheavals. The western world has become immeasurably wealthier since farming techniques drove millions off the land and labour-saving automation took hold at the end of the 18th century. The increased prosperity that followed cannot be gainsaid though economic historians argue over when real living standards really began to rise for the majority. The period of transition was marked by social unrest and repression both here and on the continent.

But it remains the case that significant technological advances, whether they be the coming of the railways or the arrival of the silicon chip, have been accompanied by economic growth and higher per capita GDP.

Arguably, we have been too slow to adapt to automation in the UK, with too many jobs that could be mechanised still being carried out manually. This is one reason behind the UK’s poor productivity and sluggish wage growth, which have been the hallmarks of the economy in recent years. Stopping automation or taxing it as Labour threatens to do would stifle investment and worsen the country’s competitive position.

Mr Haldane was right to have said we cannot be sure whether the new machine age will destroy jobs or create new ones and on what scale; but seeking to stop it, as history shows, would be foolish and futile. Although AI will have a significant impact on manual work, many of the jobs likely to go will be middle-income posts in service industries – but these will be people who should be able to adapt to new challenges. Rather than stand in the way of progress, governments should ensure that their policies are geared towards encouraging the uptake of new skills and retraining. Automation should not be considered a threat but an opportunity.

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Government, Legal, Society

Electronic signatures can be written into the law

LAW COMMISSION

SIGNING on the dotted line has been the seal on deals and contracts for hundreds of years. But the supremacy of the traditional written signature could be nearing its end as the Law Commission has ruled that it can be replaced with a typed name or even the click of a button.

The Government’s independent legal adviser has released a report stating that e-signatures can be treated as equivalent to written ones. The report could have implications for documents including Last Powers of Attorney, which must be signed manually, as well as credit agreements and land sales.

Currently many businesses are afraid to use e-signatures because they are concerned they could be challenged in court.

In one case, the commission said, a large organisation has its documents signed manually before scanning them and then shredding the originals, a practice it described as “inefficient”. Electronic signatures can take forms including a typed name, clicking on “I accept” on a website, using a finger or stylus on a touchscreen and using a password or Pin code.

The guidance raises the prospect that an email with a name typed at the bottom of it or even an email header could be treated as a signed document.

The commission has opened a consultation on whether a new law is required to enshrine the legal validity of e-signatures, but said it is “not persuaded at present” that this is absolutely necessary, because the law is already in force. “Our provisional view is that the combination of EU law, statute and case law means that, under the current law, an electronic signature is capable of meeting a statutory requirement for a signature if an ‘authenticating intention’ can be demonstrated,” it said.

The Law Commission says that recent rulings made in the High Court and the Court of Appeal set enough of a precedent for there to be no need for a new law. European law also says that e-signatures should not be treated as less effective than physical ones.

The commission also suggested that, in future, signing could be witnessed via webcam or Skype, something the law does not currently allow for.

“We provisionally propose that it should be possible for a witness to observe an electronic signature by video link and then attest the document by affixing their own electronic signature to it,” the commission said.

In the future, it said, the law could even allow a second person to virtually witness an e-signature by signing into an online platform so they can see it appear in real time.

The Law Commissioner said: “Contract law in the UK is flexible, but some businesses are still unsure if electronic signatures would satisfy legal requirements. We can confirm that they do, potentially paving the way for much quicker transactions for businesses and consumers.

“And not only that: there’s scope, with our proposals for webcam witnesses, to do even more to make signing formal documents more convenient and to speed up transactions.”

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